


It's So Dark Outside Tonight

by Rosie447



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study-ish, Diego Hargreeves is Bad at Feelings, Gen, Kid Fic, Klaus Hargreeves-centric, Mixed-Media Format, Nightmares, Pre-Canon, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26374603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie447/pseuds/Rosie447
Summary: “Go to sleep, Klaus.”“I dream about Ben sometimes.”Klaus can't sleep after Ben dies. Since their rooms are next to each other, neither can Diego.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 8
Kudos: 92





	It's So Dark Outside Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Cavetown's Talk to Me

_A major part of the cultural infatuation with the Umbrella Academy stemmed not from the children themselves, but from the fantasy that surrounded them. This was a group of young teens to whom adults regularly deferred, and who operated, in the eyes of the public, with very little in the way of institutional oversight. It was not uncommon for children reading the comics, or watching the short-lived animated show, to imagine themselves and their friends as members of the famed academy, saving the world and fighting bad guys as a team. Of being asked for help, instead of written off, by adults. It was the ultimate childhood fantasy._

_Some have theorized this is why the popularity and public support of the academy began to shift so abruptly with the loss of Number 6. Suddenly, the Umbrella Academy was no longer a form of escapism for people. The idea that the members were_ children _was no longer a game of make-believe for the audience, but an alarming reality, and the people who had once lauded them as heroes began to question if there was something far more sinister going on behind the scenes._

_\- Dr. Janelle Parker, The Rise and Fall of Umbrella Academy: America’s Favorite Child Soldiers_

* * *

“Are you awake?”

Klaus wasn’t entirely sure if he had been asleep or if he’d been staring blankly into space for long enough for the emptiness to feel sleep-like. He’d taken two Benadryl before bed, which typically left him drowsy, in addition to clearing the ghosts from his room for a couple of hours. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw Diego’s silhouette tentatively peering around the doorframe.

“Uhhh,” he said articulately. “Maybe?”

“You were screaming.”

“Oh.”

The arrangement of their room had been based, unsurprisingly, on their numbers, with even numbers on one side of the hallway, and odd numbers on the other, with Vanya down a bit further on the end. According to Pogo, this was so that she wouldn’t be woken up for middle of the night missions, but since the alarm blared throughout the entire house, Klaus had long since decided that that explanation was bullshit. Before he’d died, Ben had used to come to Klaus’ room in the middle of the night to talk whenever the Horror was bothering him, and the two of them had enjoyed a multitude of late-night parties interrupted by a half-asleep and pissed off Diego who requested they either shut up or move to Ben’s room. 

Ben would agree to do one or the other with a sincere look of apology. Klaus had discovered that a valid third option would be to invite him to join them, and that half-asleep Diego tended to be much more ramble-y and fun than fully-awake Diego, even if he would spend the better portion of the next day growling about how tired he was.

“Sorry.” 

“Do you want me to stay?”

Ben used to ask that. Of all of them, he was probably the best at feelings. Or had been. He’d used to climb up on the bed next to Klaus, back resting against the headboard, and hugging a pillow into his lap and talk about anything Klaus wanted to talk about until the ghosts screaming in the background had faded to nothing but ambient noise. 

Klaus wasn’t sure who the next best was amongst them – Allison, maybe? Vanya? _Him?_ – but it certainly wasn’t Diego, who’d snapped at Vanya at their brother’s funeral and thrown knives at the dartboard in the rec room with a blank look on his face while Luther had tried to console a crying Allison until the former had yelled at him to leave.

“You don’t have to.”

“I _know_ ,” he sounded annoyed. “Do you want me to?”

And he didn’t entirely know what possessed him to say “yeah,” except perhaps morbid curiosity. 

* * *

_“Ben was the kindest amongst them all, and perhaps the only steadying influence that kept us from completely falling apart. And we did, fall apart that is, without him._

_The funeral was in the morning, and we all lined up, matching umbrellas in the rain. Our father had a speech prepared, and in the beginning, he spoke about people who stand up to fight against the darkness. Who hold themselves to a higher standard and do the right thing, regardless of the cost. It was a familiar speech, one he’d given to my extraordinary siblings so many times that Klaus could quote him verbatim whenever their squabbles descended into pillow fights, and while I was not surprised by the similar threads I felt a curl of nausea and something like disgust that he would use Ben’s death as an excuse to get back up on top of his soapbox._

_And then he changed his tune, the words suddenly cold as ice, as he informed my siblings that the people he spoke of were not them. Because they had not been good enough, quick enough, their brother had died. I hadn’t been on the mission, and no one had told me anything about what had happened until that point._

_‘I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,’ I said softly._

_Diego had never been one to use soft words when a knife made quicker work of things._

_‘What do you know?’ he asked. ‘You weren’t there.’_

_They were given the rest of the day off from training. Luther and Allison sat in the rec room talking quietly between themselves until they ran out of things to say, and sat in silence. Diego practiced throwing knives in his room. I’m not sure where Klaus went, save for the fact that he arrived at dinner several minutes late, his movements sluggish and uncontrolled. I stared out the window, violin resting on my lap, unable to play even a single note._

_They all must’ve loved Ben. I think it would have been difficult not to._

_The next day they returned to training, barely acknowledging what had happened.”_

_\- Vanya Hargreeves, Extra-Ordinary: My Life As Number Seven, pg. 197_

* * *

Diego sighed again, and closed the door, disappearing to his room for a few moments before returning with a blanket and pillow, spreading the former out on top of Klaus’ rug and laying down on top of it. 

“You can come on my bed if you want to.”

“You’ll kick me in the shins. You _always_ kick me in the shins.”

(On occasion, when a mission required that The Umbrella Academy spend a night in a particular location, the siblings would be forced to divvy up the available hotel beds. They always argued over who got the single, even though it was invariably Allison, whom they all suspected rumored the lot of them, or at least Pogo, every time.

Bed-sharing was a bit of a contentious topic amongst them, as each insisted he was the only one with whom it was slightly bearable, and that everyone else was an absolute monster to share with. Common complaints included that Luther snored like a truck, Klaus kicked people in the shins, Ben would on occasion accidentally release the horror in his sleep, sending his bed mate either flying across the room or dangling by their ankle out a nearby window, and Diego stole all the covers.)

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do,” Diego folded the blanket spread out over the floor over himself. “Now go to sleep. We have training tomorrow.”

Klaus rolled over so he was facing his brother directly. 

“You don’t want to talk about my dreams?”

Sometimes Ben would do that. 

“What was your dream about?” he sounded like he was reading from a script, and did not particularly care for the dialogue.

_The safe hurtling off the wall and towards the portal in his brother’s stomach, his tentacles stretched in too many different directions. Allison screaming half a beat too late. Standing in the crypt, only this time, instead of ghosts, it was the Horror pawing at his face in the dark._

“There was this giant platypus,” he said. “And it was offering me weed.” 

Diego slumped back down against his pillow. “Go to sleep, Klaus.”

* * *

_The Entire Country Mourns the Loss of Child Superhero_

_Yesterday afternoon, sixteen-year-old Number 6 Hargreeves, better known by many as “The Horror” was fatally injured in a confrontation with supervillain Dr. Terminal. Sir Reginal Hargreeves, Number 6’s guardian, has requested details regarding the incident not be reported out of respect to the family and has refused to comment further on the matter, except to say that while the remaining members of the Umbrella Academy deeply feel the loss of their brother, they understand that crime will wait for no one, and will honor his memory by continuing to fight against it to the best of their abilities._

_Number 6, known to his friends and family as Ben, was a beloved member of the famed Umbrella Academy, and despite his young age, was able to save and help so many others. His loss is deeply felt by all of us, and our condolences go out to the remaining members of The Umbrella Academy, and to all others who knew him._

* * *

“We’re going to wake up Diego again.”

“You’re dead. He can’t hear you.”

“Well, _you are_ then.”

The marker squeaked against the wall, and Klaus had to squint to see the lines in the dim light. 

Back when they were little, and Dad still bothered to do room-checks, he’d made Klaus paint over the words and pictures sketched above his headboard. He’d yelled at him about it over breakfast, too, and Vanya had given him one of the glitter notebooks she’d spent her birthday money on to keep beside his bed to write on instead. But somehow putting the screams, the curses, and the shadowed figures in the bright, sparkling pages had felt wrong, and he’d shoved the notebook into the bottom of his closet and resumed writing on the wall. Now, it dimly occurred to him that he probably should have given it back.

“Is that what you saw in your dream?”

Ben was sitting cross next to him, his fingers hovering over the edge of the comforter like he wanted to play with it the way he used to when he was alive. 

“Yeah.” 

“That’s scary. But she can’t hurt you, right? She’s just a ghost.”

“Says my ghost-brother.”

Ben drew back slightly, frowning the way he always did when Klaus pointed out that he was dead.

“Sorry.” He slumped backward and held the sharpie underneath his nose.

“You know that kills brain cells, right?”

“I’m pretty sure Dad just told us that so we wouldn’t get distracted during class,” Klaus said, inhaling deeper.

“Klaus.”

“Oh no,” he threw an arm over his forehead like a fainting Hollywood starlet. “I’m becoming a vegetable.”

“I’m serious. Stop it.”

“Make me.”

Ben looked like he was about to make a valiant, but unsuccessful effort to do just that when the doorway cracked open. 

“Klaus?”

“You woke him up.”

“ _We_ woke him up.” He rolled over, turning so that his feet rested on the top of the headboard. The legs on his striped pajama pants had just begun to get short, and when he sat like that, they came up several inches higher than they should have. It was strange; he’d never really outgrown clothes before. Their mother usually would have taken care of it long before it even registered for him as an issue, but Mom had been ever so slightly off since Ben died and hadn’t gotten around to them yet. 

“Klaus, it’s three in the morning,” Diego rubbed his eyes. 

“Go back to sleep. Don’t worry about me.”

“You’re being super loud.” He frowned, stepping forward as he examined the wall. “What’s that?”

The half-face woman. It had been a few months since their mission to the abandoned coal factory, but the partially blown up ghosts still kept popping up in his dreams, reaching for his arms the same way they had that day. The half-face woman had gotten the closest, her words a strange lisp around the empty space where the rest of her mouth would have been. The owner of the factory could have prevented the accident, she’d said, they were supposed to be heroes, they should _do_ something. 

What they had done was dismantle the killer robots being built in the basement, at the behest of the factory owner, now thirty years older than he had been when he’d taken the insurance money to let his employees burn.

“An abstract rendering of a giraffe.”

“Uh-huh,” Diego did not look away from the sketch, even though the lie was perfectly feasible – Klaus’ art skills left quite a lot to be desired. 

“You should tell him.” Ben hugged his legs closer to his chest. “You’ll feel better if you talk to someone and stop sniffing sharpies.”

“I’d feel better if people just let me sniff sharpies in _peace_!”

“What?” 

“Nevermind,” Klaus said. “It’s fine. I’m fine. You can go back to bed.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Actually, yes.” He pointed a vindictive finger at the exact spot Ben was currently sitting. “You can sleep here.” 

Diego hesitated a moment before sighing and sliding onto the bed, while Ben glared and moved to avoid being sat on. Or, rather, sat-through. 

“If you kick me, I’m leaving, and I’m taking all your pillows.”

“Okay.” He had a split second to grin smugly before the more corporeal of his brothers swiped the sharpie from his hands and capped it.

“And don’t sniff these. They’ll mess up your brain. More than it already is messed up.”

Ben didn’t say anything in response to that, but Klaus was relatively certain he heard a snort of approval when Diego rolled over, folding the edge of the comforter underneath his shoulder and leaving Klaus’ side of the bed completely exposed. 

* * *

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY ADVENTURES: S1E12 

“ROBOT MADNESS”

[THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY are standing in a circle around MR. MONOCLE. The seven of them are positioned outside of the ruins of an abandoned coal factory. A gust of wind sends the coal dust swirling across the screen. NUMBER 4 sneezes.]

NUMBER 3 [pats her hair]: Mr. Monocle, this coal dust keeps getting in my hair. And my clothes! [NUMBER 3 hugs her arms close to her chest] Why are we even here?

MONOCLE: Now, Number 3, you know as well as I do that no matter what the circumstances may be, the Umbrella Academy will always rise to the occasion. 

[Large clanking noises are heard in the background]

NUMBER 3: What is _that_?

NUMBER 1: I’m guessing that’s the reason we’re here!

MONOCLE: Right you are, Number 1! It seems Dr. Chaos has built an army of killer robots using the machines found in this very factory.

NUMBER 4: All the machines here are super old! How good of robots can they be?

[A very large robot enters.]

NUMBER 6: Pretty good, it looks like!

NUMBER 2: Not as good as the Umbrella Academy!

NUMBER 1: That’s for sure! Alright, team – let’s go!

[Break for TITLE SEQUENCE]

* * *

“Diego?”

“Mmph,” Diego rolled over, burying his face in Klaus’ pillow. He hadn’t spoken since he’d come in earlier, looking tired and sliding into the conveniently vacant spot next to Klaus, muttering something about the noise. It was becoming something of a routine. 

“Do you remember your dreams?”

“No.”

“Ever?”

“No. I don’t really dream.”

“Oh,” Klaus looked up at the ceiling. There was a flash of hot pink in the air conditioning vent from where he’d hidden the Mardi Gra beads he’d snagged after a recent mission to New Orleans. He was relatively certain they’d all picked up a string at one point or another. Klaus had grabbed two, in fact, so Ben could have one in spirit. When they’d gotten back, Ben had suggested he pawn them off to Vanya, who’d looked at them with an odd kind of wonder and hugged him for several seconds too long when he handed them off. “That sounds nice.”

“Go to sleep, Klaus.”

“I dream about Ben sometimes.”

Ben himself was not present. There were some things you couldn’t say with the ghost of your dead brother in the room. Diego glanced up from the pillow.

“Is he angry?”

In his nightmares, Ben was always scared, the way he had been in that split second when they’d all known what was about to happen before it happened but after it was too late to stop it. Scared and confused. Losing control.

“No,” Klaus said. “Not really. Why would he be angry?”

Diego turned towards the door, his back to Klaus. “I dunno. Nevermind. Go to sleep.”

“Okay.” 

* * *

_Selections from the notes of Sir Reginald Hargreeves:_

_Number 4 continues to insist he cannot summon the late Number 6. Whether this is a product of laziness or a side of effect of increased medication use is unclear. Pogo informs me that despite no longer showing cold symptoms, he has continued to ask for diphenhydramine at night. Both he and Grace have been instructed to deny him this request until he can successfully communicate with Number 6._

_Number 2’s performance in regards to manipulating projectiles has improved recently, erratic sleeping habits aside, however, his temperament has become increasingly volatile and disruptive. His lack of cooperation during team exercises, in particular, has impacted the overall functionality of the group. If this behavior persists, I believe he could be removed from future missions with no great loss._

* * *

Klaus’ window overlooked the alley space between their house and one of the buildings directly adjacent to it. At one point it had been a storefront, with a few open rooms above it for rentals. When news broke that there was living space next to the famous _Umbrella Academy,_ the rooms had filled so quickly the owner of the store had been forced to give up their business for more apartment space, only for those rooms to all vacate within the year when the tenets realized that not only did the child superheroes rarely go outside, but their doorstep was constantly overrun with crowds of people and reporters. So now it was empty, at least officially, with a single occupied room on the second floor, which was adjacent to Klaus’.

The tenant’s name was Mr. Clearwater, and he used to wave at him sometimes. It hadn’t been until a few weeks after the funeral that Ben had clued Klaus in to the fact that Mr. Clearwater was dead. That he had been dead since he’d fallen down the narrow flight of stairs in the poorly designed half-store, half-apartment complex building nearly eight years ago. 

Klaus still waved at him. Just to be polite.

(“It’s hard to tell, sometimes,” he told Ben.

“None of us ever waved with you. You didn’t think that was weird?”

He had shrugged. “Not really. You’re all rude.”)

Mr. Clearwater was sitting at his writing desk, and Klaus was perched on the edge of his bed, squinting up at the stars. None of them, save Luther, had much patience for astronomy. Once, during a late stakeout near some abandoned railway station, he’d tried to teach them all how to spot constellations, but all Klaus could see was a kind of mess of lights with no clear pattern. 

(“Light takes time to travel, just like everything else,” Luther had said. “Some of the stars are so far away that by the time the light reaches us, and we can see them here, they’re already gone.”

“Exploded. Into black holes,” Diego added. That was the part of the unit that he’d chosen to fixate on.

“Some of them. Not most, though. When stars die, they usually just collapse in on themselves.”

“So most of these stars are dead?” Allison asked. 

“The night sky is a star graveyard.” 

“I guess you could say that,” Luther shrugged. “I always thought of it more like a memory.”

“They’re ghosts,” Klaus said. After that, the conversation shifted gears. No one was going to dispute him on it. He was, after all, the expert.)

The sound of the doorknob startled him.

“There is no way I woke him up,” he said. “I haven’t been asleep. Or talking.”

“Klaus,” Ben was sitting cross-legged on his desk chair.

“I’ve literally done nothing,” he hissed back. “Maybe it’s Luther or Allison making noise. Or Vanya. Or Pogo.” At that look, he sighed. “Probably not Pogo. But it could be any of us. But _no_ . He just _assumes_ it’s me.”

Diego ducked his head in almost as soon as the sentence was over.

“Klaus?”

“Listen, I–”

“Shut up!” 

And he did. Ben did not raise his voice often. It was unclear which of the two of them it startled more.

“Just… go along with it, okay?”

“You have to stop doing this, okay?” Diego said, his voice marked by the slow cadence of someone who had just woken up. 

“Okay,” Klaus glanced at Ben for confirmation. Ben made a circling motion with his hands. _Keep going._ “But, uh, for tonight?”

Diego’s shoulder seemed to relax a fraction before he sighed, annoyed and slid into the now-customary spot next to Klaus. “Yeah, sure. _Fine._ ”

The twin bed was not large enough for both of them. It was verging on not large enough for Klaus alone, ever since he’d hit a growth spurt and become the second tallest amongst them in the span of a couple of months. But, if Klaus was honest, something about the lack of space forcing him to stay still was relaxing, and the non-Ben ghosts tended to give him more space when he wasn’t alone.

“What was that about?” he whispered, once he was sure Diego had fallen back asleep, cocooned in the majority of Klaus’ blankets. 

“You’re really dense sometimes,” Ben said. He could get away with saying that, Klaus supposed because he was the best at feelings. And also dead. “He’s not always here for _you._ ”

“Oh.” Klaus glanced at his brother, whose dark hair was sticking up in several different directions, messier and more sleep-tossed than struck him as likely for someone who never had dreams. He rolled over so that their backs were facing each other and stared out the window. There were some things that he could have perhaps said or done in response to that. 

Instead, he fell asleep and kicked Diego in the shins. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Any and all feedback is appreciated!
> 
> Feel free to come chat with me on tumblr, @itsthenovelteafactor :)


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